Social media is the collective of online communication channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content sharing, and collaboration. Social media properties include websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis among others. The number and types of social media are so vast and varied that it can difficult for individual consumers to stay current. Even if a consumer is able to stay current, social media properties may blink out of existence as quickly as they came into being for any number of reasons including technological problems, funding problems, lack of interest, etc.
It is even more difficult for entities (e.g., businesses, financial institutions, universities) to determine if a social media property can be an asset to business. Accordingly, the decision to create and/or maintain a presence on a specific social media property can be convoluted for an entity.